21 For the destruction of the daughter of my people I am broken: I am dressed in the clothing of grief; fear has taken me in its grip.
And you are to say this word to them, Let my eyes be streaming with water night and day, and let it not be stopped; for the virgin daughter of my people is wounded with a great wound, with a very bitter blow.
At their coming the people are bent with pain: all faces become red together.
My soul, my soul! I am pained to my inmost heart; my heart is troubled in me; I am not able to be quiet, because the sound of the horn, the note of war, has come to my ears.
If only my head was a stream of waters and my eyes fountains of weeping, so that I might go on weeping day and night for the dead of the daughter of my people!
And said to the king, May the king be living for ever: is it not natural for my face to be sad, when the town, the place where the bodies of my fathers are at rest, has been made waste and its doorways burned with fire?
For there those who had taken us prisoners made request for a song; and those who had taken away all we had gave us orders to be glad, saying, Give us one of the songs of Zion. How may we give the Lord's song in a strange land? If I keep not your memory, O Jerusalem, let not my right hand keep the memory of its art. If I let you go out of my thoughts, and if I do not put Jerusalem before my greatest joy, let my tongue be fixed to the roof of my mouth.
I am dark, but fair of form, O daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Let not your eyes be turned on me, because I am dark, because I was looked on by the sun; my mother's children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vine-gardens; but my vine-garden I have not kept.
As for me, I have not said; Let the day of trouble come to them quickly; and I have not been hoping for the death-giving day; you have knowledge of what came from my lips; it was open before you.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Jeremiah 8
Commentary on Jeremiah 8 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 8
The prophet proceeds, in this chapter, both to magnify and to justify the destruction that God was bringing upon this people, to show how grievous it would be and yet how righteous.
Jer 8:1-3
These verses might fitly have been joined to the close of the foregoing chapter, as giving a further description of the dreadful desolation which the army of the Chaldeans should make in the land. It shall strangely alter the property of death itself, and for the worse too.
Jer 8:4-12
The prophet here is instructed to set before this people the folly of their impenitence, which was it that brought this ruin upon them. They are here represented as the most stupid senseless people in the world, that would not be made wise by all the methods that Infinite Wisdom took to bring them to themselves and their right mind, and so to prevent the ruin that was coming upon them.
Jer 8:13-22
In these verses we have,